November 20, 2007 -- Back in September when the RadeonHD Linux driver was finally introduced, it offered support for both the R500 and R600 series. On the first day of the driver's availability, we couldn't help but to use the RadeonHD with the 2900XT, which has been ATI's flagship graphics card. While this xf86-video-radeonhd driver still doesn't support 3D, it was a glorious sight seeing an open-source driver working with this high-end ATI graphics card. Today David Airlie announced that the Radeon driver would be supporting the ATI R500/600 series. David Airlie and Alex Deucher had been working on an AtomBIOS branch of the Radeon driver in xf86-video-ati, and this morning it finally went public.

November 16, 2007 -- Late last month NVIDIA released the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, however, today NVIDIA has finally delivered an updated Linux display driver to add this new product support as well as correct other outstanding issues. This new Linux display driver is version 169.04 Beta, which is a large version bump from the previous 100.14 series.

November 16, 2007 -- Back on September 6th of this year AMD shocked the open-source community by committing to the development of a new open-source display driver (this driver is now known as RadeonHD) and that they would be providing specifications to the development community. A week later, they set precedence by not only releasing the documentation to the developers but to the everyone! Their first batch of documentation covered the basics for the RV630 and M56 GPUs and was released freely to the public without any Non-Disclosure Agreement! However, they still have much more GPU documentation that has yet to be released. Some simply believe AMD is doing this as a publicity stunt, but today we have new details to share as they prepare for their next GPU documentation release.

November 13, 2007 -- It's been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life. Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support. Was this release worth the amount of hype and did it solve everyone's problems? For me, simply, no. After seven months of waiting, updating, and struggling, things are not good for me, in every possible feature of the ATI Linux driver I use.

November 10, 2007 -- Over the past two weeks there has been a number of new developments in regards to the open-source NVIDIA driver, Nouveau. In fact, the Nouveau team is preparing for the first stable release! This stable open-source NVIDIA driver will support 2D, X-Video, and EXA acceleration with all graphics cards from the NV05 to NV40 (GeForce 7) series. Read more in the 30th edition of the Nouveau Companion.

November 09, 2007 -- With all of our coverage at Phoronix of the different ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, if you're new to Linux or just get caught off guard by all of the different open and closed-source drivers, it can be confusing to know which driver is right for you and your needs. At the request of many readers, and the obvious need for a concise article explaining the different solutions, we have written a synopsis of the Linux graphics drivers currently available. This is really to let those new to Linux know what choices are available for them and their graphics card.

November 04, 2007 -- This past Friday we had delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of the open-source Radeon driver against the new closed-source fglrx driver from AMD. These benchmarks had just looked at the AIGLX performance when using Compiz on an Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. In all of the benchmarks except one, the fglrx driver had carried a staggering lead over the open-source competition. In addition to these Compiz benchmarks, on the same system we had also ran some additional benchmarks to see for gaming and 2D rendering how the two ATI Linux drivers compare.

November 02, 2007 -- For those that may have missed it, the ATI/AMD fglrx 8.42 display driver that was released last month had introduced AIGLX support. The open-source "Radeon" driver for ATI graphics cards going up to the R400 generation has supported AIGLX for quite some time, but the ATI binary display driver hadn't until last month. However, one of the complaints about the fglrx implementation of AIGLX is that in the 8.42.3 driver, some are encountering slow performance in Compiz / Compiz Fusion. We have taken an ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI-E graphics card, which is supported by both the Radeon and fglrx drivers, and have compared their Compiz performance in a few different scenarios.

October 30, 2007 -- Since AMD introduced their new Linux display driver last month, we have published a number of different articles looking at the Radeon performance across their different GPU product generations. This ATI/AMD Linux driver testing and exploration continued this month with the release of the 8.42 driver, which finally introduced AIGLX support for the fglrx driver. One area though we haven't yet analyzed is how their official Linux driver now compares to their much-optimized Windows Catalyst driver. Today, however, we will be looking just at that as we compare the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB performance under Linux and Microsoft Windows Vista.

October 28, 2007 -- In this edition of the Nouveau Companion, the developers of the open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA display driver talk about IRC color coding, NV04 performance improvements, texture fixes, EXA advancements, register combiners, and more. Also being worked on by the Nouveau camp has been a NV4x TTM and Gallium prototype. The Nouveau developers are still in need of some additional testing, so be sure to give them a hand if you're able to do so.